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The activities associated with an Entrepreneur’s life are stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. It requires withstanding problem after problem. However, in retrospect, the side effects of years of struggle – pleasure and success naturally emerge as a result. 

WhistleDrive is an Urban Mobility Company, providing full-stack employee transportation services and logistics services for corporates and enterprises. It envisions and strives to be India’s Transportation Leader and build Technology Driven Solutions to enable Smart Urban Mobility. 

Within the initial 3 years, it was titled ‘India’s Fastest Growing Employee Transportation Company’ and recognized as “The Next Global Tech 50” at the World Innovators Meet,2019. 

Leadership is influential!

Mr. Rakesh Munnanooru (Founder), the very essence of leadership, was born and brought up in Karimnagar, Telangana state. He graduated from Shiv Nadar University in While excelling in his academics, Mr. Rakesh also developed a keen interest in Entrepreneurship in the early days of his engineering. Startups allured him and he founded a few startups during his graduation.

Mr. Rakesh is a technologist, speaker, and writer at several Top Media Outlets and Conferences with a focus on Employee Transport, Urban Mobility, AI and Entrepreneurship. He loves reading books, watching movies and building the future of Urban Mobility. 

The Solemn Idea!

In 2015, a time where location-based services were taking over the market. He actually wanted to be part of the wave and solve a critical problem with real-time location sharing technology. From personal experience and a bit of on-field research, he quickly realised that there is a potent market for car driver services. 

Betting on his vision and the people around him, Mr. Rakesh founded WhistleDrive in 2016 with his interest to build technology-enabled driver on-demand services. The team built an end to end solution for the problem and the subtle customer adoption was very encouraging and they quickly grew in numbers. In time, they realised that the same technology could help manage corporate employee transportation and marched with a pilot run. It was a gargantuan success and they soon started providing fleet services along with the software solution.

Rakesh led WhistleDrive all the way from ground zero to raising a cumulative 77 Cr funding in series A & B rounds which is the largest fund-raise in office commute space. 

Problems never Cease!

Amidst the Covid pandemic situation, with nation-wide lockdowns, Transportation was one of the highly affected industries especially corporate travel. The trip count drove them batty as they saw a gradual decrease in numbers falling to zero.

A few days went by in anticipation of things getting back to normal. The outlook on happenings across the world and based on their interactions with industry leaders, The team decided to work on the things that can help WhistleDrive get through the pandemic, That’s when they took the decision to start logistics services.

“We had the idea of venturing into intra-city logistics from a very long-time but we had in the roadmap of 2022 or near, COVID has left us with no choice but to work on it NOW, and challenged us to push our limits” – Rakesh Munnanooru.

As they say, Winners never quit, they keep progressing against all the odds! The proactive team members, with all the grit and determination, helped the company ride the covid wave, bouncing back to pre-covid numbers. 

The Ensuing Days! 

The company focuses to build solutions and processes that could benefit Urban Mobility in the country. Currently, they are working on building a technology platform for logistics, which could enable the logistics companies to manage their transport operations efficiently. 

Currently, the company operates in 11 cities across PAN India for Logistics services and 4 cities (Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru & Pune) in Employee Transportation services. It strives at Scaling the Intra &Inter City logistics and building technology.

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of technology in transport operations, be it corporate transport or last-mile logistics, technology holds a crucial role in strengthening the process. So the next few years there will be high adoption of technology in transportation. 

Last but not Least!

Mr. Rakesh unfolds the fact that unless you think your idea can have a large scale impact, you shouldn’t be working on it. It takes years of sacrifice and toiling decades to become successful in any business. So, we should pick something we won’t give up when things get tough. Choose wisely! He exclaims that if you are into Entrepreneurship for money, you better be building a skill set that gets you a high paying job. 

“The people who work with us should understand and believe the Vision And once it is understood, it is not my vision alone. It’s OUR VISION.” 

Website- WhistleDrive

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